Bridge the Gap Between Identifiable Customer Records and Their Anonymous Advertising Touchpoints

Bridge the Gap Between Identifiable Customer Records and Their Anonymous Advertising Touchpoints

In the past few years, “digital transformation” is the buzzword on marketers’ minds. Brands are focusing on customer data strategies and technologies that deliver real-time and relevant messaging to customers. Marketers want a cross-channel understanding of a customer’s path to purchase and ruminate over whether or not they have the right technology to match dollar spent with dollar earned. They haven’t been able to easily tie offline transactional data with ad spend–until now.

Today, we’re excited to announce BlueConic’s new partnership with LiveRamp, the market-leading identity platform. This partnership enables retailers and brand manufacturers to attribute their ad spend to offline transactions in a privacy-conscious manner. Together, the technologies balance the needs in the market for consumer privacy and optimal ad spend.

Why we built it

The vision grew from extensive conversations with the team at LiveRamp about how many of their brick & mortar retailers struggle to tie offline conversions to user ad exposure in an accurate and privacy-safe way. Brand marketers struggle to transform transactions into customer-level attributes that can then be used to optimize targeting and closed-loop measurement. There will be broad applications for this kind of attribution, but marketers that sell offline, directly to consumers will find this solves an immediate pain point.

How it works

The BlueConic and LiveRamp connection allows marketers to match BlueConic segments, which are assembled from first-party individual-level data, transactional data, and behavioral data, directly to LiveRamp Identity Links: universal, anonymous identifiers that are tied to devices in the LiveRamp identity graph. This then gets consolidated in a neutral data warehouse for attribution measurement purposes.

BlueConic and LiveRamp are in a unique position to build out this solution because:

BlueConic’s integration with LiveRamp is server-to-server not just a cookie pass-over, allowing more data to be exchanged between the two platforms.

BlueConic’s architecture is built on a profile database, as opposed to the rigidly-structured relational databases of other customer data platforms. This combination of structured and unstructured data enhances the ability to build user segments within the platform by directly associating transaction data to individual-level customer attributes.

What it means

A retailer leveraging this new partnership, for example, can attribute ad spend to an in-store purchase. Marketers will know if customers made a purchase after exposure to a specific ad and can then use that data to optimize ad spend, calculate ROI on specific ad campaigns, and improve the omnichannel consumer journey. Through this partnership, marketers will be able to intuitively push a data flow process that includes PII storage, onboarding, ad exposure, and measurement.

BlueConic’s SVP of Strategy, Cory Munchbach, is at LiveRamp’s RampUp 2019 in San Francisco February 25thto officially kick-off the partnership and answer questions about the three flavors of identity solutions.

Sam Ngo is the Director of Product Marketing at BlueConic. Prior to joining BlueConic, she was a Researcher at Forrester, covering the social intelligence space. She helped clients put in place the right people, process, and platforms to make use of the structured and unstructured data from social channels. When she's not knee-deep in translating the value of BlueConic, she's trying to understand the science of baking.